Tag: Sunny Awhefeada

Godwin Awhin And The Inevitability Of Mortality

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By Sunny Awhefeada   Growing up, we were made to think or we naturally felt that the white race was better endowed or superior to the black race. Our parents talked about “oyibo” referring to the white man and “Inoko” referring to London with an accent that conferred sublimity on both. They gave children names that idealized and idolized “oyibo”. School also did not help matters. We were not only taught “why Africa remained a dark continent for a long time”, we took lessons that seemed to validate how the…

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Is Fencing Nigeria the Solution?

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By Sunny Awhefeada   Nigeria is at war! Make no mistake about it. The nation has become a sprawling killing field irrigated by the blood of compatriots. And it appears as if the armed forces are overwhelmed. War induces trauma in a number of ways. The fighting troops faced with the stark reality of death before a maniacal opponent could buckle and collapse even without the latter firing a shot. Soldiers are human and they dread mortality. Soldiers are the first victims of trauma in war situations. The thought of…

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A Nation On Trial By Sunny Awhefeada

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By Sunny Awhefeada The Nigerian state is undergoing a series of turmoil that is a desideratum in her sojourn to nationhood. Great nations did contend with such moments in their history. The journey to nationhood is not a hundred metre dash. It is long, tortuous and treacherous. It births heroes and throws up villains. While the heroes struggle to delineate the clear path the nation should walk, the villains deploy everything including subterfuge to subvert the quest in order to satisfy some base desires that often denude the majority of…

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Do You Know Who The Fuck I Am?

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By Sunny Awhefeada     The vulgar title of this piece owes its shocking essence to the vulgarity of a lawbreaker who masquerades as a lawmaker. I have resolved not to mention his name throughout this intervention in order not to dignify him and reduce this column to the base degree of his character. The lawmaker who is a member of the Federal House of Representatives is also a fake senator as he thumped his chest and told his victim “I am a senator”. That wasn’t a slip of tongue,…

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What Is The Meaning Of Independence

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By Sunny Awhefeada I must begin by confessing that the title of the present discourse is not my invention. It was what I thought was an innocent question from Isio, my eight years old daughter. The day was Monday, the eve of this year’s Independence Day anniversary and the time was morning just before seven o’clock. As has been the norm since 2008, I already had the key to the car in my hands waiting as my wife dressed Isio up for school so I could take her on school…

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Analysis: The Unfortunate Major

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  By Sunny Awhefeada There is a video of the story of the execution of a brilliant army officer, Major Daniel Bamidele circulating right now. My wife drew my attention to it two days ago and I told her that I was familiar with the story. Many news magazines had written about it in the 1980s when the tragic incident took place. The 1980s was the decade when the genre of news magazine flourished in Nigeria. The magazines carried reports and stories which were well researched, deep and detailed. It…

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An Olympian Shame! By Sunny Awhefeada

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By Sunny Awhefeada As literature students at the University of Benin, we played with words as we honed our poetic and oratorical skills. One of the many superlative words we deployed in those hungry, but starry eyed days was “Olympian” which in our context meant “exceptional” or “superhuman”. We deployed it to foreground traits that we found extraordinary, lofty and outstanding. So we had such turns of expression such as “Olympian height”, “Olympian achievement”, “Olympian attainment” to describe feats that awed our impressionable minds. As counter to such positive acclaims…

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Let us Return to Olden Times

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By Sunny Awhefeada, Time does fly and circumstances for good or bad contribute to how swiftly time runs. Growing up, our parents and grandparents spoke in Urhobo about oke awanre which in its literal sense meant “olden days” and we would be so enraptured listening to them and wanting to know what happened in the olden days they so much idealized. The olden days for them constituted an ideal era when everything was perfectly in order in a way that looked like utopia. In fact, our grandparents’ idea of the…

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Opinion & Analysis: Okuama Is No More!

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By Sunny Awhefeada   The above title reechoes a significant statement in the understanding of the disruptive essence of colonialism in Africa as depicted in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, a novel which is crucial to the understanding of the African predicament. It was Obierika who told his audience including his great friend Okonkwo, “Abame is no more”. The village of Abame was wiped out because her people killed a Whiteman the very symbol of the colonialism in Africa. The colonial enterprise left in its wake a series of punitive…

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Opinion: Tales Of Many Woes

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  By Sunny Awhefeada   Charles Dicken’s perception of the Victorian world defines how humanity apprehends that era more than one hundred years after it elapsed. The Victorian era eponymously christened after the phenomenal Queen Victoria also saw Britain attaining the peak of greatness. Britain ruled the waves and the world, and she was not just a significant factor in the colonial enterprise, but she was very wealthy through the unsympathetic plundering of her rich colonies. Despite the fortunes she enjoyed, the citizens were afflicted by grave misfortunes and that…

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